General Charles de Gaulle delivering a speech to the French people from London during the second world war.
Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

On 26 August 1944, General Charles de Gaulle took a high profile walk on the Champs-Elysées. The leader of the Free French had arrived in Paris the previous evening, a day after his advancing troops, and had declared himself president of the newly liberated republic. In a city still swarming with snipers, a walkabout was risky but, as Julian Jackson says, it was “a supreme example of De Gaulle’s instinctive showmanship”. Parisians flocked in their thousands to see the man most of them knew only as a voice broadcasting on the BBC from London. It was “the largest gathering of its kind in the history of France”. De Gaulle recalled this extraordinary moment in his memoirs: “Ahead stretched the Champs-Elysées. It looked more like the sea. A huge crowd was massed either side of the street. Perhaps two million souls. The roofs were also black with people … People were hanging from ladders, flagpoles and lamp posts. As far as the eye could see, there was only this living tide of humanity, in the sunshine, beneath the tricolour.”

The history of a nation and of a people is built from such defining moments. And, as Jackson’s remarkable 900-page study ably demonstrates, no one played a more influential role in 20th-century France than De Gaulle. He “was reviled and idealised, loathed and adored, in equal measure”, and aroused such passion due to his involvement in France’s two 20th-century “civil wars”. A relatively unknown army officer when France was invaded in 1940, De Gaulle quickly established himself as the leader of the Free French in defiance of the legal government headed by Marshal Pétain, France’s most revered military figure, who signed an armistice with Hitler. After heading the provisional government from 1944 to 1946, De Gaulle stepped aside from power, though he returned in 1958 when France was threatened with a military coup by generals dissatisfied with the handling of the Algerian crisis.

Fiercely nationalistic, De Gaulle was driven by the belief that it was his destiny to save France

To tell the life of De Gaulle is also to chart the history of modern France, and in this suitably monumental biography rich with illuminating anecdotes, Jackson portrays his subject as a complex and contradictory character. The General (as he was known) was proud, arrogant and very difficult to deal with. Outbursts of sudden fury alternated with interludes of charm. Harold Macmillan, who failed to convince de Gaulle to admit Britain into the Common Market, described him as “the Emperor of the French”, adding: “I have never known a man at once so ungracious and so sentimental.” He distrusted both Britain (“perfidious”) and America (“it has no depth nor roots”). He once quipped that the British based the Free French in Carlton Gardens because it is “a dead end, with the only way out through Waterloo Place”.

Fiercely nationalistic, de Gaulle was driven by the belief that it was his destiny to save France. Yet he was realistic too about the country he loved: “How can one govern a country which has 258 cheeses?” He was dismissive of politicians and yet ruthlessly Machiavellian in his pursuit of power. Conservative, elitist and authoritarian by nature, de Gaulle was also deeply pragmatic, which led him to eventually embrace Algerian independence against the wishes of his military.

With his rallying cry of “Unity!”, he was a figure of stability to whom France turned at times of national crisis, but he was also “brutally divisive”, hated by the radicals of 1968 as well as the far right. His death in 1970 was “one of the most intense moments of collective emotion in the history of modern France”. Tens of thousands of Parisians walked up the Champs-Elysées in the pouring rain to lay flowers at the Arc de Triomphe. One noted in his diary: “the man made us all bigger”. He remains hugely influential. In a 2010 opinion poll, De Gaulle emerged as the historical figure the French most admired, the man who in 1944 “saved the honour of France”.

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